You know, physics/artillery puzzlers have been around almost as long as games have had semi-realistic physics. There are Flash games older than your little brother about throwing a kitten as far as possible, or slamming somebody into a brick wall. This isn’t a new genre of game.

But apparently it needed some feathery friends with anger management issues, because Rovio has just announced how many copies of the game it’s moved: 500 freaking million. Yeah, we guess being on every single thing with a processor powerful enough to play it will do that, but half a billion copies?

Keep in mind, too, that Rovio’s real money doesn’t even come in from sales; it’s the advertising that pops up in the corner as you play the game. This puts “Angry Birds” possibly in the realm of Google for advertising sales…and ten bucks says Google’s going to be buying them before the year is out.